by Mario Puzo
As he came out of the church with his mother, his six bodyguards were waiting for him with Pisciotta. Aspanu’s face was white with fury as he said, “You have been betrayed, Turi. The Maresciallo has returned from Palermo with twenty extra men to arrest you. They have your mother’s house surrounded. They think you’re inside.”
Guiliano felt for one moment a kind of anger at his own rashness and stupidity and resolved he would never be so careless again. Not that the Maresciallo with his twenty men could have captured him even in his mother’s house. His bodyguards would have ambushed them, and there would have been a bloody battle. But that would have spoiled the spirit of his Easter homecoming. The day Christ had risen was not the day to break the peace.
He kissed his mother goodbye and told her to return home and freely admit to the police that she had left him at the church. In that way she could not be charged with any conspiracy. He told her not to worry, that he and his men were heavily armed and would easily escape; there would not even be any fighting. The carabinieri would not dare to follow them into the mountains.
Guiliano and his men left without even being sighted by the police. That night in the mountain camp, Guiliano questioned Pisciotta. How could the Maresciallo have known about the visit? Who was the informer? Everything must be done to find out. “That will be your special task, Aspanu,” he said. “And if there is one, there may be others. I don’t care how long it takes or how much money we spend, you must find out.”
Even as a child, Pisciotta had never liked the buffoonish barber of Montelepre. Frisella was one of those barbers who cut hair to suit his mood of the day, one time modishly, another time puckishly, another time with the extreme conservativeness of a peasant farmer. By varying his style he put forward his claim to being an artist. He was also too familiar with his superiors and too patronizing to his equals. With children he was playful in that particularly spiteful Sicilian style which is one of the less pleasant sides of the island character; he would nip their ears with his scissors and sometimes cut their hair so short that their heads looked like billiard balls. So it was with grim satisfaction that Pisciotta reported to Guiliano that Frisella the barber was the police spy and had broken the sacred code of omerta. It was obvious that the Maresciallo was not making a random strike that Easter day. He must have received information that Turi would be there. And how could he have gotten that information since Turi had sent word to his family only twenty-four hours before?
Pisciotta used his own informers in the village to check on every step the Maresciallo had taken during that twenty-four hours. And since only Guiliano’s mother and father had known about the visit, he questioned them casually to see if they might have accidentally given anything away.
Maria Lombardo soon smelled out his intention. She said to him, “I spoke to no one, not even my neighbors. I stayed in the house and cooked so that Turi would have an Easter feast.”
But Guiliano’s father had gone to the barber Frisella on the morning of his son’s visit. The old man was a little vain, and he wanted to look his best on the rare occasions when his son Turi came to visit at the house in Montelepre. Frisella had shaved and barbered the old man and made his usual jokes. “Was Signor perhaps going into Palermo to visit certain young ladies there? Was he receiving important visitors from Rome?” He, Frisella, would make Signor Guiliano look handsome enough to receive a “king.” And Pisciotta visualized the setting. Guiliano’s father with a little secretive smile on his face as he grumbled that a man could look like a gentleman for no reason except his own satisfaction. And yet the swelling of importance at knowing his son was famous enough to be called the “King of Montelepre.” Perhaps the old man had come in on other occasions and the barber had learned that Guiliano visited the same day and so put two and two together.
Maresciallo Roccofino dropped into the barbershop every morning for his daily shave. There did not seem to be any conversation that could convey information from the barber to the policeman. But Pisciotta was certain. He sent spies to the barbershop to lounge around all day and play cards with Frisella at the little table he kept out on the street. They drank wine, talked politics and shouted insults at friends who passed by.
Over the weeks Pisciotta’s spies gathered more information. Frisella always whistled the tune of one of his favorite opera arias when he shaved and cut hair; sometimes the large oval-shaped radio would play with recordings from Rome. This would always be the case when he attended the Maresciallo. And there would always be a time when he leaned over the police officer and whispered something. If you were not suspicious it was only a barber being deferential to the wishes of his customer’s pleasure. But then one of Pisciotta’s spies got a look at the lire note the Maresciallo used to pay for his service. They noticed it was folded, and the barber put it in a special watch fob pocket in his vest, underneath his white coat. When the spy and one of his helpers confronted Frisella and forced him to show the note, it was of ten thousand lire denomination. The barber swore it was for his services over the past few months, and the spies pretended to believe him.
Pisciotta gave his evidence to Guiliano in the presence of Terranova, Passatempo and Corporal Silvestro. They were in their camp in the mountains, and Guiliano went to the edge of one of the cliffs that overlooked Montelepre and stared down at the town.
Master Frisella, the barber, had been a part of that town ever since Guiliano could remember. As a little boy he had gone to Frisella to have his hair cut for Holy Confirmation, and Frisella had given him a small silver coin as a gift. He knew Frisella’s wife and son. Frisella had shouted jokes to him in the street and always asked after his mother and father.
But now Frisella had broken the sacred law of omerta. He had sold secrets to the enemy; he was a paid informant of the police. How could he have been so foolish? And what was he, Guiliano, to do with him now? It was one thing to kill the field police in hot combat, it was another thing to execute, in cold blood, an avuncular older man. Turi Guiliano was only twenty-one years of age and this was the first time he had to use the cold cruelty so necessary in great endeavors.
He turned back to the others. “Frisella has known me all my life. He gave me lemon ices when I was a child, do you remember, Aspanu? And maybe he just gossips with the Maresciallo, doesn’t really give him information. It’s not as if we told him I was coming to town and then he told the police. Maybe he just gives theories and accepts the money because it is offered. Who would refuse?”
Passatempo was looking at Guiliano with narrowed eyes, as a hyena would regard the body of a dying lion, wondering if the time was ripe and safe to dash in and tear off a piece of flesh. Terranova shook his head slightly, a smile on his lips as if he were listening to a child tell some foolish story. But only Pisciotta answered him.
“He’s as guilty as a priest in a whorehouse,” Pisciotta said.
“We could give him a warning,” Guiliano said. “We could bring him over to our side and use him to give false information to the authorities when it suits our purpose.” Even as he spoke, he knew he was wrong. He could no longer afford such gestures.
Pisciotta said wrathfully, “Why not give him a present, a sack of grain or a chicken while you’re at it? Turi, our lives and the lives of all the men out there in the mountains depend on your courage, on your will, on your leadership. How can we follow if you forgive a traitor like Frisella? A man who breaks the law of omerta. The Friends of the Friends would have his liver and heart hanging from the barber pole by this time and on less evidence. If you let him go then every greedy traitor will know he can inform once without punishment. One of those ‘onces’ could be our death.”
Terranova spoke judiciously. “Frisella is a stupid buffoon, a greedy and treacherous man. In ordinary times he would only be the village nuisance. Now he is dangerous. To let him off would be foolhardy—he is not intelligent enough to mend his ways. He would think we are not serious people. And so would many others. Turi, you have suppressed the activiti
es of the Friends of the Friends in the town of Montelepre. Their man Quintana moves very cautiously, though he makes some imprudent statements. If you let Frisella off with anything less than death, the Friends would think you weak and test you further. The carabinieri would become bolder, less afraid, more dangerous. Even the citizens of Montelepre would think less of you. Frisella cannot live.” He said this last almost with regret.
Guiliano listened to them thoughtfully. They were right. He was conscious of Passatempo’s look and read to the man’s heart. Passatempo could never be trusted if Frisella lived. There was no going back to being one of Charlemagne’s knights, there was no going back to resolving differences in honorable combat on the Fields of the Cloths of Gold. Frisella would have to be executed and in such a way as to achieve maximum terror.
Guiliano had an idea. He turned to Corporal Silvestro and asked, “What do you think? Surely the Maresciallo would have told you his informants. Is the barber guilty?”
Silvestro shrugged, his face impassive. He did not speak. They all recognized that it was a point of honor for him not to speak, not to betray his former trust. That his not answering was his way of telling them that the barber certainly had some contact with the Maresciallo. Still Guiliano had to be sure. He smiled at the Corporal and said, “Now is the time to prove your loyalty to us. We will all go to Montelepre together and you will personally execute the barber in the public square.”
Aspanu Pisciotta marveled at his friend’s cunning. Guiliano had always surprised him. He had always acted nobly and yet he could plant a trap worthy of Iago. They had all come to know the Corporal as a truthful and honest man with a sense of fair play. He would never consent to perform the execution if he was not sure the barber was guilty, no matter what the cost to him. Pisciotta saw that Guiliano had a little smile on his face—that if the Corporal refused, the barber would be judged innocent and go free.
But the Corporal stroked his bushy mustache and looked them all in the eye. He said, “Frisella cuts hair so badly he deserves to die for that alone. I’ll be ready in the morning.”
At dawn Guiliano and Pisciotta and ex-Corporal Silvestro took the road down to Montelepre. An hour before them Passatempo had left with a squad of ten men to seal off all streets emptying into the central square of the town. Terranova was left in charge of the camp and prepared to lead a strong band into the town if they ran into serious trouble.
It was still early morning when Guiliano and Pisciotta entered the town square. The cobbled streets and narrow sidewalks had been flushed with water and some children were playing around the raised platform where the donkey and mare had been mated on that long-ago fateful day. Guiliano told Silvestro to chase the children out of the square so they could not witness what was about to happen. Silvestro did so with such temper that the children scattered like chickens.
When Guiliano and Pisciotta entered the barbershop with machine pistols at the ready, Frisella was cutting the hair of a wealthy landowner of the province. The barber assumed they had come to kidnap his customer and he whipped off the cloth with a cunning smile as if to present a prize. The landowner, an old Sicilian peasant who had grown rich during the war by selling livestock to the Italian Army, stood up proudly. But Pisciotta motioned him to one side and said with a grin, “You don’t have enough money to pay our price and for us to take the trouble.”
Guiliano was extremely alert and kept his eyes on Frisella. The barber was still holding his scissors. “Put them down,” he said. “You won’t need to cut hair where you’re going. Now get outside.”
Frisella dropped the scissors and turned his wide buffoon’s face into a clown’s grimace as he attempted to smile. “Turi,” he said, “I have no money, I’ve just opened the shop. I’m a poor man.”
Pisciotta grabbed him by his full bushy hair and dragged him out of the shop and into the cobblestoned street where Silvestro was waiting. Frisella fell on his knees and began to scream. “Turi, Turi, I cut your hair when you were a child. Don’t you remember? My wife will starve. My son is weak in the head.”
Pisciotta could see Guiliano wavering. He kicked the barber and said, “You should have thought of those things when you informed.”
Frisella began to weep. “I never informed on Turi. I told the Maresciallo about some sheep stealers. I swear on my wife and child.”
Guiliano looked down at the man. At that moment he felt that his heart would break, that what he was about to do would destroy him forever. But he said gently, “You have a minute to make your peace with God.”
Frisella looked up at the three men surrounding him and saw no mercy. He bowed his head and murmured a prayer. Then looked up and said to Guiliano, “Don’t let my wife and child starve.”
“I promise you they will have bread,” Guiliano said. He turned to Silvestro. “Kill him,” he said.
The Corporal had watched the scene in a daze. But at these words he triggered his machine pistol. The bullets lifted Frisella’s body and sent it skittering across the wet cobblestones. Blood darkened the little pools of water between the cracks. Blood ran black over the cracks the water had not reached and flushed out little lizards. There was a long moment of hushed silence in the square. Then Pisciotta knelt over the body and pinned a white square of paper on the dead man’s chest.
When the Maresciallo arrived that was all he found as evidence. The shopkeepers had seen nothing, they claimed. They had been working in the rear of the store. Or they had been studying the beautiful clouds over Monte d’Ora. Frisella’s customer said that he was washing his face in the basin when he heard the shots, he had never seen the murderers. But despite all this it was clear who was guilty. The square paper on Frisella’s body read, SO DIE ALL WHO BETRAY GUILIANO.
CHAPTER 12
THE WAR WAS now over but Guiliano’s had just begun. In the course of two years, Salvatore Guiliano had become the most famous man in Sicily. He built up his domination of the northwest corner of the island. At the heart of his empire was the town of Montelepre. He controlled the towns of Piani dei Greci, Borgetto and Partinico. And the murderous town of Corleone, whose inhabitants were so ferocious they were notorious even in Sicily. He ranged just short of Trapani, and he threatened the town of Monreale and the capital of Sicily itself, Palermo. When the new democratic government in Rome put a price of ten million lire on his head, Guiliano laughed and continued to move confidently through many of the towns. He even dined occasionally in the restaurants of Palermo. At the end of the meal he would always leave a note under the plate which read, “This is to show that Turi Guiliano can go wherever he likes.”
Guiliano’s impregnable fortress was the vast galleries of the Cammarata Mountains. He knew all the caves and all the secret paths. He felt invincible here. He loved the view of Montelepre below him, the Partinico plain that stretched away to Trapani and the Mediterranean Sea. As twilight became blue, reflecting the faraway sea, he could see the ruined Greek temples, the orange groves, the olive orchards and the grain-filled fields that were Western Sicily. With his binoculars he could see the padlocked roadside shrines holding their dusty saints inside.
From these mountains he sallied forth with his men onto the white dusty roads to rob government convoys, stick up railway trains, and relieve rich women of their jewels. The peasants riding on their painted carts in holy festivals saluted him and his men at first with fear and then with respect and affection. There was not one of them, not a shepherd or laborer who had not benefited from his distribution of loot.
The whole countryside became his spies. At night when children said their prayers they included a plea to the Virgin Mary “to save Guiliano from the carabinieri.”
It was a countryside that fed Guiliano and his men. There were the olive and orange groves, the vineyards of grapes. There were the flocks of sheep whose shepherds looked the other way when the bandits came for a few lambs. Through this landscape Guiliano moved like a ghost, lost in the hazy blue light of Sicily which is the cerulean Medit
erranean Sea reflected from the sky.
The winter months were long in the mountains, cold. And yet Guiliano’s band grew. At night scores of campfires freckled the slopes and valleys of the Cammarata range. The men used the firelight to clean their guns, repair their clothing, do their laundry in the nearby mountain stream. Preparing the communal evening meal sometimes caused arguments. Every village in Sicily had a different recipe for squid and eels, disagreed on what herbs should be disbarred from the tomato sauce. And whether sausages should ever be baked. Men partial to the knife for murder liked to do laundry; the kidnappers preferred the cooking and sewing chores. The raiders of banks and trains stuck to cleaning their guns.
Guiliano made them all dig defense trenches and establish far-flung listening posts so they could not be surprised by government forces. One day when the men were digging they came upon the skeleton of a giant animal, bigger than they could imagine. Hector Adonis arrived that day bringing books for Guiliano to study, for Guiliano was curious now to know everything in the world. He studied books of science, of medicine, of politics, philosophy and military techniques. Hector Adonis brought him sackfuls every few weeks. Guiliano took him to where the men had dug up the skeleton. Adonis smiled at their puzzlement. “Haven’t I given you enough books on history?” he said to Guiliano. “A man who does not know the history of mankind for the last two thousand years is a man living in the dark.” He paused for a few moments. The mellow voice of Adonis was the lecturing voice of a professor.
“This is a skeleton of a war machine employed by Hannibal of Carthage who two thousand years ago traveled over these mountains to destroy imperial Rome. It is the skeleton of one of his war elephants, trained to combat and never before then seen on this continent. How frightening they must have been to those Roman soldiers. Yet they availed Hannibal nothing; Rome vanquished him and destroyed Carthage. These mountains have so many ghosts, and you have found one of them. Think, Turi, one day you will be one of the ghosts.”
